Pilot Projects

Literature Review on (Policy Making) Pilot Projects as Predictive Methods

In the Encyclopedia of Public Administration and Public Policy, [1] Sreeja Nair and Heleen Vreugdenhil provide the following summary about the topic of (Policy Making) Pilot Projects as Predictive Methods: Predictive methods are deployed by various agencies, including the government, to pretest different programs and policies for their likely impacts, process of implementation, and stakeholder acceptability prior to launching these completely or on a large scale. The underlying motivation while deploying these predictive methods is that these will provide results that are largely indicative of what outputs, outcomes, and challenges can be expected when these programs and policies are implemented in a full-fledged manner

While the importance of pilots in supplying information and learning platforms, pretesting policies, and programs including innovations prior to their implementation on a full scale is well acknowledged, there are challenges in terms of their ability to act as a predictive method beyond the context in which these are applied, when these are scaled-up, and when these are designed for complex issues and rapidly changing policy environments. Appropriate evaluation criteria and indicators while focusing on monitoring and learning aspects, need to be considered in view of these challenges. Political factors including the presence of multiple stakeholders can further influence the “predictive potential” of pilots.

Resources

Notes and References

1. Entry about (Policy Making) Pilot Projects as Predictive Methods in the Encyclopedia of Public Administration and Public Policy (2015, Routledge, Oxford, United Kingdom)

See Also

Further Reading

• Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance (2018, Springer International Publishing, Germany)